ABOUT VIVICA

Healing guide. Framework creator. Fellow Coyote.

Maestra curandera in the Amazonian Shipibo shamanic tradition

Vivica is a Healing Guide, the creator of Embodied Relational Mapping™, and a maestra curandera in the Amazonian Shipibo shamanic tradition. Her work lives at the intersection of trauma, neurodivergence, and the sacred.

Born in Italy, she left at nineteen and has since lived in Germany, Spain, and Brazil. She speaks five languages and carries the perspective of someone who has lived between worlds—never fully belonging to one place, but fluent in many.

She came into the world as an unexpected child, raised by a young single mother doing her best. Undiagnosed AuDHD meant the very things that made her who she was, her sensitivity, her intensity, her way of seeing, were met with criticism and confusion rather than understanding. Being othered early shaped much of what came after.

Her life has been rich not only in trauma, but in beauty, curiosity, and the kind of learning that only comes from saying yes to the unfamiliar. This multicultural lens informs everything about how she works: her ability to hold complexity, to see patterns across different systems, and to meet people wherever they are without imposing a single way of being.

Embodied Relational Mapping emerged from Vivica's own healing journey as much as from her years of clinical practice.

Vivica holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. Her formal certifications include Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy (The Embody Lab, with Nkem Ndefo, Dr. Arielle Schwartz, and Dr. Scott Lyons), Integrative Somatic Parts Work (Level 1 and 2 with Fran D Booth), Trauma-Informed Plant Medicine Facilitation (AYA Healing Retreats), and advanced training in ADHD in adults through NICABM. She is also a Certified Clinical Technician in Whole Food Nutrition.

Before ERM, she built The Healing Foods Method, one of the first online wellness programs, and spent a decade teaching the ketogenic diet for health to thousands of clients worldwide. She is the author of four books on nutrition, including Keto Cooking for Healing and Weight Loss and The Essential Carnivore Diet Cookbook.

She still integrates nutritional support, lab interpretation, and supplement guidance into her practice when clients need it, honoring the body as a site of healing alongside the psyche and spirit.

As Vivica deepened the understanding of her own trauma and began training in IFS-informed parts work, what emerged was a different kind of work altogether: one that addressed the nervous system, the relational field, and the shadow material that lives beneath conscious awareness.

Following her clients' needs—and her own—she moved deeper into somatic therapy, attachment repair, and the integration of plant medicine experiences. Over four years, she synthesized these threads into ERM: a framework designed specifically for neurodivergent adults navigating trauma, attachment wounds, and the adaptive patterns that keep them safe but stuck.

Vivica is AuDHD, self-diagnosed late after years of shame and self-abandonment. Her lived experience navigating Complex PTSD and neurodivergence shapes every aspect of how she works.

She knows what it means to live in a nervous system that was never designed for the world it was placed in—and what it takes to stop trying to force that system into compliance and start building a life that actually fits.

The Coyote became her guiding symbol: the trickster spirit she had always loved, now recognized as the perfect metaphor for the neurodivergent nervous system in its original state: wild, adaptive, brilliant, and deeply misunderstood.

In ERM, the Coyote represents the part of us that existed before the trauma, before the masking, before the shame. The work is not to fix the Coyote. The work is to remember it was never broken.🐾

Vivica has spent ten years in dedicated study within the Amazonian Shipibo shamanic tradition of Curanderismo, training under Maestro Kesten Ronon in Iquitos and Maestro Wexa Metsa in Contamana. She has completed multiple master plant dietas, with Koman and Noya Rao as her primary medicines, and holds the status of maestra curandera. Her medicine name is Naya Koman Kena.

This path has taught her that healing is both psychological and spiritual, that the plants are intermediaries to the divine, and that transformation requires reverence as much as technique.

Raised Catholic but traumatized by the nuns in boarding school, Vivica spent years reclaiming her faith outside the walls of institutional religion. She found it in the Gnostic Gospels, the Gospel of Mary, and Kemetic cosmology—traditions that honored the divine feminine and the soul's direct relationship with the sacred.

For her, the plants are not an escape from God but a return to it. She believes in a creative consciousness that moves through all things, and her work is rooted in that reverence.

She is also a fellow traveler in the ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) recovery program, which deepened her understanding of family systems, relational trauma, and the generational patterns we inherit and must choose to break.

Her work is grounded in the belief that neurodivergence is not a deficit and trauma is not a life sentence.

"Working with Vivica was the first time I felt seen for who I actually am, not who I've been trying to be. The Coyote framework helped me understand that my neurodivergence isn't something to fix -it's the original design. I finally have language for my experience and a path forward that doesn't require me to keep performing 'normal.'"

- Client, 2024

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